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The Games organisers had only just given Matt Weston the box for the medal he won on Friday night. He had been keeping it stashed in a spare sock in his top drawer since the moment he took it off that evening. As soon as it is out, he has a second one to put back in its place.
The 28-year-old Weston became the first British athlete in history to win two medals at a single Winter Olympics, after he and his 25‑year‑old teammate Tabitha Stoecker won the inaugural Olympic mixed team skeleton race in a combined time of 1min 59.36sec, 0.17sec ahead of the German pair of Axel Jungk and Susanne Kreher.
The mixed team event is new for the Olympics. The fastest men and women from each country are paired together, and then race the track back-to-back for a combined time. The key difference from the regular race is that the mixed team event uses a reaction start in which the racers have to set off as soon as a light randomly turns off. There were two false starts among the 15 teams, but it did not make too much difference to Weston, who has dominated this field all week.
“I’m extremely proud of what I’ve been able to achieve in the past couple of days, especially to win the first-ever team event,” Weston said. “It’s absolutely amazing, I’m over the moon, buzzing, and I’ve got no idea what’s next, to be honest. Probably the pub I guess.”
They have plenty to celebrate. Weston and Stoecker describe themselves as each other’s best friends, her boyfriend is going to be the best man at his wedding later this summer. Weston said: “It’s like a family, really, because we all spend so much time with each other.”
It took another astonishing run by Weston to pull it off. He and Stoecker were the very last pair to race, and by the time they started the track record had already been broken five times in a row.
Stoecker had a lightning-fast start, but made a couple of mistakes in the second half of her run that meant Weston needed to make up three-tenths of a second if they were going to overtake Jungk and Kreher. It might sound like the blink of an eye to you and I, but it is a huge deficit in a sport that comes down to hundredths of a second.
“I’ve got a lot of trust in him,” Stoecker said. “He’s the individual Olympic champ, and his standard of sliding is insane, so I had a lot of faith that he was going to lay down another exceptional run, but it’s always nerve-wracking when you have to watch the clock.”
Up at the top of the track, Weston had pulled his helmet down low to stop him from watching Stoecker’s splits. “All I was doing was listening to my coach telling me the timings, and all I could think of was: ‘Don’t false start.’”
He shot off the line in 0.12sec, the fastest reaction time of any of the 30 athletes competing. “The flow that he has on the sled, it’s just unmatched, so from about halfway down I could feel that the gold was coming,” Stoecker said. So could everyone else watching.
Weston is so smooth on the sled he moves down the run like a bullet along the barrel of a gun. “I was just staying very calm, trying to be as boring as possible. Just tick the boxes, get the job done, and hopefully that will be enough.” It was more than that.
Even then, Weston being the man he is, he was still nitpicking at what he could have done differently. “I think on corner nine, I wasn’t exactly smooth coming out …” he began, when Stoecker cut in over the top of him. “Stop it, Matt! Stop it! You don’t need to do that any more! You’ve got six months off!”
Not to mention two gold medals. Weston laughed. “Yeah, all right, I’ve been told off now.” The only bittersweet note to it was that they knocked their friends and teammates Freya Tarbit and Marcus Wyatt down into fourth sport.
Only one other British athlete has won two gold medals in the Winter Olympics, and that was Lizzy Yarnold, who won the women’s skeleton in both 2014 and 2018.
“I mean, there’s some great names in the British Winter Olympic history, I think to even consider putting my name next to those is a massive honour,” Weston said. “A lot of those guys have been a massive inspiration. Especially within the sliding sports as well. The success that they’ve had has only opened the door for us.”
